There are two things I know about Emily Dickinson: She was a reclusive spinster, and many of her poems can be sung to the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas." The second thing, which is definitely true, is addressed in Wild Nights with Emily, Madeleine Olnek's deadpan biopic that tongue-in-cheekily...

Family, a sunny and likable small-scale comedy from first-time filmmaker Laura Steinel, belongs to the subcategory of movies in which bad role models and hopeless kids are paired up so they can learn from each other: Bad Santa, Bad Teacher, Role Models, School of Rock, etc. In this one, selfish,...

(Note: I'm going out of my way not to "spoil" anything here, including things that happen within the first 20-30 minutes that would normally be fair game in a review. You're welcome, nerds.) When we last saw the Avengers, they were part of the lucky half of the universe that had not been wiped...

Etymology time! “Hagazussa” (“hedge sitter”), an Old High German word that gave us witchy terms like “hag” and “hex,” refers to the old women who would sit near the hedges that separated cultivated land from wild forests, gathering herbs and such while the menfolk did agricultural...

Like most movies, The Curse of La Llorona is part of the extended Conjuring universe. The connection is negligible -- the older priest in this one had an encounter with the evil doll in The Conjuring prequel Annabelle -- but it's enough to slap the franchise name on it and tide fans over until the...

The R-rated Hellboy is a comedically gory but otherwise not particularly funny reboot of the comic book character (previously brought to PG-13-rated life by Ron Perlman and director Guillermo del Toro), a red-skinned, horned demon with a giant fist who works with the Bureau for Paranormal Research...

Here's an amusing coincidence. Little, which is a reversal of the Tom Hanks classic Big, was written by Tina Gordon Chism, who also wrote What Men Want, a reversal of What Women Want. Chism's niche, apparently, is mediocre rewrites of fantasy comedies where the premise is reversed and the main...

Missing Link is Laika's fifth gorgeously detailed work of stop-motion animation and the fourth to leave me kind of cold. Only the studio's debut, Coraline, had the intended impact; ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings were all wonderful to look at but offered no emotional...

The interesting thing about anti-abortion propaganda film Unplanned is how little it tries to persuade anyone of anything. Preaching to the choir, it presupposes that everyone already agrees abortion is murder and that no further discussion is necessary to prove it. It also assumes you believe...

Hollywood continues to solve racism one bigot at a time with The Best of Enemies, a shiny, shallow trinket based on true events that, in the hands of first-time feel-good filmmaker Robin Bissell, seem made-up. It's 1971 in Durham, N.C., where the schools are still segregated and C.P. Ellis (Sam...

(On HBO.) Little had to be changed about the plot of Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son to make it work with an adaptation set in the present, but something must have been lost in translation. As directed by first-timer Rashid Johnson (a respected Chicago artist) from a screenplay by...

The title character in Hotel Mumbai is actually called the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, or the Taj for short, and it was one of a dozen Mumbai locations attacked by Islamic terrorists on November 26, 2008, ultimately killing 174 people and injuring hundreds more. The film, directed by first-timer...

The whole point of Pet Sematary -- both Stephen King's 1983 novel and the effective 1989 movie version -- is that you shouldn't revive the dead because they won't be the same when they come back. (It's one of those universal, timeless messages.) So it's a little on the nose that the new adaptation,...

Despite their adventures ostensibly being aimed at kids, most superheroes aren't children themselves. Except for the Spider-Men and occasional moments with the younger X-Persons, we rarely see a superhero revel in the sheer delight of having awesome powers. So part of what makes Shazam! a treat...

The title character in The Beach Bum, a stoner-poet named Moondog, is the part Matthew McConaughey was born to play, and he is indeed at his McConaughey-est here: grinning, giggling, pontificating, publicly urinating, stumbling hazily from one party to the next, just generally living his best life....